I see, all across Twitter, that Wardle, the guy who made Wordle, has sold it for a Very Substantial Sum -

And some people are apparently groaning about Selling Out To The Man.

And others are saying, well, this be the law of the jungle of the internet, that running something off one's own site is not a sustainable thing these days.

And others are ( Read more... )

Review in the latest Literary Review of that book The Hidden Caee of Ewan Forbes (not alas fully freely available on their website) - I posted a link to an article apropos of this case last month - which actually makes explicit something that was lurking at the back of my mind.
I.e. that Forbes was not the beneficiary of some halcyon and now ( Read more... )

Dept of Signs and Portents: Snake mystery after lone, elderly python lays clutch of eggs: The oldest snake in captivity - known only as 361003 - hasn’t been near a male python for two decades: [U]nusual though not rare for ball pythons to reproduce asexually. The snakes also sometimes store sperm for delayed fertilisation.

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Dept of, uh, History ( Read more... )

I was a bit beswozzled by this article: A dirty secret: you can only be a writer if you can afford it.
I feel there are a whole load of assumptions there, including that Real Writers Rite Litry, because one hears of people who are not even Big Names in genre who have nice little earners going in the fields of genre self-publishing, like that woman ( Read more... )

Or, update to this post of last week:
While I was away I was solicited for a contribution to a project which a) it was gratifying to be asked to contribute to (lo, I am still relevant) and b) the pay was somewhat, if only slightly, more munificent than one is used to. The downside was that the deadline is very tight. So on my return I have been in ( Read more... )

Because of the delay to the flight, BA gave passengers a voucher for refreshments while waiting: I had some nice nosh at Tortas Frontera in Terminal 5.
There was no-one sitting in the seat next to me on the plane! Luxury!!
I managed to catch 2-3 hours sleep during the flight, which is something of a record.
I mean, I still feel like the walking ( Read more... )

At first I thought, this is A Different Culture: (Ask A Manager, third one down): My manager complains when people don’t contribute money for life events.
Okay, I can see retirement, marriage, babies - but deaths in family? huh?
And on this heavying official level? Not only policing whether but how much?
In the earlier days at my workplace when ( Read more... )

Thinking about this post of
( Read more... )

I came across this noxious thing lately: A physician’s letter to his wife, and one might suppose he was married to Dora Copperfield except that he does actually mention meeting her at college and we later discover that she does in fact have a working life of her own -
So presumably she does also have an income of her own and not just some meagre ( Read more... )

I suppose it is possibly a good thing that there is a popular-type biography of Anne Lister just out: Gentleman Jack: A biography of Anne Lister, Regency Landowner, Seducer and Secret Diarist by Angela Steidele and Katy Derbyshire, though the word 'secret' there makes me cringe. Keeping a diary was, after all, in most cases a private practice (and ( Read more... )